supertuxkart-devel

Hi all,
the "Google Summer of Code" is finally over - technically it ended last
week with the announcement of the results, but real life has kept me too
busy to send this email earlier :(
First of all a congratulation to your three students - hilnius,
unitraxx, and cand. From our side of view you have all passed GSoC - so
just make sure that you submit your code in time (I don't know the exact
deadline), and you all should be fine.
All three students have done a rather excellent job: we have three
branches with huge improvements waiting to be merged into the trunk.
- Cand added significant graphical improvements. On one side that made
our artist samuncle very happy, on the other hand this will keep
him busy, since now he has to improve all tracks to make use of
the new features.
- unitraxx added an online lobby, allowing people to login, declare
friends, and even store achievements. All in preparation for a full
online experience ... which will keep our team busy ;)
- hilnius added networking support, allowing people to connect different
computers and play against each other. The first online game was
already played between Arthur and hilnius.
Also a big thanks to our mentors - Stephen, funto, and auria, who helped
and supported our students. Your guidelines and experience was important
to give us all the excellent outcome we had. A special mention also to
Arthur, who was the go-to person on irc, tirelessly motivating our
students, keeping them motivated with his puns, and acted as a tester.
I am aware that all of you are very keen to see the next improved
version of STK, so here a brief overview of the things that will happen
next:
- Arthur is already organising the 0.8.1 release. It will not include
any GSoC work yet, but all the improvements and bug fixes that have
been done in the months since the 0.8.1 release. Note that the main
developers (esp. auria and myself) have not done very much work
for that release, but we had important contributions from the
community, esp.:
- deveee who tireless fixed bug after bug, earning himself the title
'Bug Fixer of the Year' ;)
- Funto's and Yasin's soccer mode
- using the bubble gum as shield thanks to johannesr1
- filtering and sorting of addons thanks to unitraxx (contributed
before he started working on stk)
This is not supposed to be a complete changelog, I just picked those
improvements to show our growing community.
- The next release will merge in cand's graphical improvements. This
will require a fair amount of work on tracks to improve them. Samuncle
has developed a new style for this, and he has started to create a
great looking track following the new guidelines. This takes a huge
amount of work (creating new textures, new models, ...), so any
support here is appreciated.
At this stage I am not entirely sure if this release will be called
0.8.2, or 0.9. The latter would make more sense, since it will
visually be a big change, on the other hand 0.9 was according to our
milestones the online version (which would then need to be 0.10 or
so). Well, numbering is not important - 0.XY it will be ;)
While samuncle is quite keen on that version, the fully graphically
improved version of stk might only arrive after 0.XY. I would be happy
to release an early version with only one or two new tracks. We
really want to have more artists working on STK, so showing off a
glimpse of what STK can look like will hopefully motivate more
artists.
- After that we will start working on the online mode in earnest. Even
though thanks to GSoC we have a solid base to build on, there's still
a lot to be done. We have to merge the work from hilnius and unitraxx.
And while they did a good job, there is still a lot of testing and
polishing to do. One important outstanding thing (which was not part
of hilnius' task): hiding latency by using rewinding. Without this
stk can be played with 'good' network conditions, but not reliably
and fluently enough under real world conditions. At this stage we are
not sure what 'good' conditions actually mean - LAN with cable only?
LAN with wireless connections? WAN? A lot of things to test ;) And
depending om time we might release some WAN-only networking versions
before.
Also, depending on features we want to include, we might also need at
least one dedicated server for the lobby, and ideally to prevent
cheating perhaps also dedicated online servers - though discussing,
testing, and evaluating various approaches are the things that will be
on our todo list over the next months.
Now, I will not present a timeline here. After all, STK is a hobby
project for all of us, and delays do unfortunately happen. But for us it
feels we are getting close to the long awaited 1.0 release. As always,
we can use any help to speed things up - bug fixes, coding new features,
testing, documenting, 2d / texture artists, 3d modelling, ... And we are
happy to give anyone a hand with getting started. So, don't hesitate and
contact us - either here on the list, or for more immediate answers on
irc (#stk at freenode)
Cheers,
Joerg

For few moments I was scared that "end of GSoC and future work" means
"end of GSoC and end of future work". Fortunately that's not the case
:)
Thanks to all GSoC participants that decided to work on STK. Also
thanks to all developers who typically work on it. Keep up your
amazing work!
Cheers,
--
Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, dos
http://dosowisko.net/

Congratulation to everyone (students, mentors, etc).
Here is my roadmap for 3D art.
1) Finish harvest (the new farm) soon as possible to have a reference and a
benchmark for coders to test the new pipeline
2) Making a documentation and concept art for tracks according to new
guidelines so new artists can easily see what we want. Add minor feature to
the game (like specular mapping :P).
3) Starting to convert (aka remake everything (and yes it's really a
complete remix since it's a new pipeline and I'm also using a library)).
4) \o/
Since guidelines aren't finished and harvest too I think it's too early for
someone that want to help me.
Sam
2013/10/9 Sebastian Krzyszkowiak <dos@...>
> For few moments I was scared that "end of GSoC and future work" means
> "end of GSoC and end of future work". Fortunately that's not the case
> :)
>
> Thanks to all GSoC participants that decided to work on STK. Also
> thanks to all developers who typically work on it. Keep up your
> amazing work!
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, dos
> http://dosowisko.net/
>
>
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